Half the Blood of Brooklyn

  The bridge slips away and we’re on Leif Erikson Drive

  . The ocean on our right. I look at it. I’ve never seen it from this close.

  Lydia stares.

  —I flew over it. I flew over the whole damn thing. Twice. Imagine. And I’ll never do it again.

  She leans her forehead against her window.

  —Fucking Vyrus.

  I glance at her.

  —Still talking to Sela?

  The muscles in the back of her neck jump.

  —Sometimes. She’s Coalition now, but she’s still a friend.

  I look at the road, arcing onto Shore Parkway

  , away from the water.

  —She’s fucking the girl.

  She turns from the window.

  —I know.

  I fish a smoke from my pocket.

  She looks at the map in her lap, points.

  —Cropsey Ave.

  I take the exit. Neither of us talks. We hit a red at Neptune and watch the people draining away from the boardwalk where the rides are dark and the arcades are shutting down and the drunks are puking on the sidewalk outside Nathan’s.

  She points again and I take a right on Surf.

  She starts folding the map.

  —Love doesn’t have a reason.

  I ignore that nonsense.

  She doesn’t.

  —Sela and the girl feel something. You can’t do anything about that. And it’s none of your business anyway.

  I roll down toward Seagate and pull to a stop and park on Mermaid Ave.

  , around the corner from 37th and the ragged-ass end of the Riegelmann Boardwalk.

  —Yeah, funny you should say that about it being none of my business.

  I take out the big .44 and flip the cylinder and make sure I filled it with big hollow-point bullets. I did.

  —Because I’ve been thinking just those words for the last half a fucking hour.

  Lydia points at the gun.

  —Planning to use that, Joe?

  I drop the revolver in my pocket and take out the hogleg and break it open.

  —No plans, just hopes.

  She opens her door and swings down.

  —Do me a favor, keep it in your pants.

  We walk down the sidewalk, windblown sand crunching under our feet. We make for the lights flickering on the far side of the boardwalk.

  She inhales sea air.

  —Smells good.

  I inhale smoke.

  —Sure does.

  We walk out on the boardwalk.

  Lydia stops.

  —She could change everything.

  I stop.

  She’s looking out at the water, a big moon rippling on the waves.

  —The girl, Joe. Sela says. Joe. She could change everything.

  I drop my smoke and grind it under my heel.

  —Don’t talk crazy, Lydia. You’re smarter than that.

  And I walk away from her and look down at the canvas tent, painted black and speckled with red gloss, that juts from beneath the edge of the boardwalk, pennants flapping from the center pole, torches burning at the entrance, a big banner cracking in the wind as a tall guy in a top hat and a tailcoat spiels in front of it.

  —FREAKS! That’s rightytighty, ladeez and gentilemans! Real! Live! Freaks! Not the cut-rate varietals one finds down the shore! But the Real McCoy! Bearded ladies and tattooed men and wild Borneo savages are best left to the amateurs! Within the folds of this modest tent we will reveal to you actual FREAKS of nature! Creatures that spurn the light of day! Fearful, unnatural sports of fate that were never meant to be! Step up and step in, ladeez and gentilemans! A show unlike any other! A spectacle! A horror show! A festival of disgust and blood! Step! Right! Up!

  Lydia comes alongside me.

  I look at her.

  —Can we leave now, or do we have to sit through this shit?

  Apparently we have to sit through this shit.

  —Ladeez and gentilemans!

  I spill the last unpopped kernels from the red and white striped popcorn box into my mouth and crunch them.

  —Know what would make this better?

  —Never before on any stage at any time have you witnessed an appetite like the appetite of…The Glasseater!

  Lydia is staring through the torch-lit gloom to the tiny stage where the MC gives the tails of his shabby coat a flip and bows as the curtain parts and reveals a scrawny dude in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.

  —If it wasn’t utterly exploitive?

  Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater’s neck while the other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails, shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent sewing needles.

  He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit, dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.

  I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.

  —If I didn’t know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.

  The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.

  The frown on Lydia’s face carves itself a little deeper.

  —Waste. Immoral waste.

  I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the remainders.

  —Not your blood.

  She glances at me, shakes her head.

  —Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It’s mine and it’s yours. And more than that, it’s the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what’s going on.

  The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.

  Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for the next act.

  —That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone, someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole just wasted. It’s like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC on full blast. Makes me want to puke.

  The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with “Jailbait.”

  The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples, sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.

  I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.

  —Then I’m guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.

  The MC raises his arms.

  —Ladeez and gentilemans! The esoteric and erotic mysteries of the Far East as revealed by Vendetta and Harm!

  Lydia jumps from the bleachers, puts her head down, storms across the stained and threadbare carpets laid over the sand and ducks out of the tent.

  I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a cane. More blood flows.

  Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn’t to demonstrate how one lays on nails without being harmed, I follow Lydia. r />
  The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean, streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that half the tent hides beneath.

  Lydia is stomping over the sand, kicking up little plumes with her Docs, headed for the tide line.

  —Come get me when it’s over. If I stay, I’m going to make a scene.

  I peek through a gap in the entrance, see what the chicks are up to, and figure she’s right.

  My Zippo won’t hold a flame in the wind so I take a light from one of the torches and lean against a piling, listening to the rock ’n’ roll and the gasps and screeches of the audience, smoking and looking at the ocean in the moonlight. Counting seconds till the show is over and I can collect the Freaks Boss and get back to my life. Such as it is.

  —Bum one of those?

  It takes me a second to smell him, another second to see him. The first because he comes at me from downwind, the second because he’s a fucking midget.

  I squeeze the pack between my fingers, feel three left, give him one.

  He takes the smoke and pats the pockets of the denim overalls he wears over his bare, blue-tattooed torso and arms.

  —Light?

  I offer him my smoke and he lights his own and gives mine back.

  —Thanks.

  I take a drag.

  —So what’s it like?

  He scratches a wrinkled bald head.

  —What’s that?

  I hold my hand three feet over the sand.

  —Midget Vampyre? How’s that work? Find it a bitch getting to someone’s neck?

  He smiles, flashing full sets of steel dentures, canines every tooth, and points at my upper thigh.

  —Usually find something I can get to in a pinch.

  I think about kicking him down the beach. Wonder if I could get him to the water. Wonder if he would float.

  He takes a silver flask from the side pocket of the overalls, swigs from it and holds it up.

  —You the guy from Manhattan?

  I wave the flask off.

  —I’m the driver. One you want is by the water.

  He takes another slug of the thick dark rum I smell in the flask and slips it away in his pocket.

  —Whatsay you come in and take a look at the finale?

  —Whatsay we skip the donkey fucking, or whatever you close with and you grab your boss so we can do the swap and I can get back where I belong.

  He looks up at me, blows a stream of smoke that just reaches my face.

  —Buddy, I am the boss. And till the show is over, no one goes anywhere.

  He drops the half-finished smoke at my feet.

  —You can finish that if you want.

  He turns and heads for the back of the tent.

  —Me, I got an entrance to make.

  It’s a showstopper.

  People cover their eyes, howl, run from the tent, one or two start crying, a couple who’s been here before laugh and shake their heads, still not believing what they’re seeing.

  The midget is standing in the middle of the stage, tugging lengths of intestine from the hole he’s chewed in his own belly and draping them over the shoulders of Vendetta and Harm, who admire them like mink stoles, giving them the occasional lick.

  Lydia watches, nothing about her moves except her discontent. That’s all over the fucking place.

  The midget brings a loop of intestine up to his mouth, shows the steel teeth, the music crescendos, a full-fledged Guitar Wolf freak-out, he opens his jaws wide, the torches flutter suddenly, his teeth glitter and snap down and the torches go out and red and blue strobes pulse and everyone screams as the midget collapses and the girls fall on him and tear his flesh and stuff their mouths full of it and the guy who did a strongman act at the beginning of the show appears in his executioner’s hood and swings a broadsword and hacks at the girls as they continue to feed.

  The strobes stop. The tent goes black. The screams kick up a notch.

  I smell the midget’s infected blood, whiffs of his bowels, the kerosene the torches were dipped in, seaweed, salt air, stale beer and corndogs from the trash barrel, cigarette and pot smoke and the blush of uninfected blood freshly drawn.

  I grab Lydia and push her behind me and put my hand on the butt of Solomon’s hogleg.

  Lights come on, strings of red Christmas lights looped among the rigging wires and poles of the tent.

  The people on the bleachers stop shrieking.

  The midget is standing center stage, dripping gore, he steps forward, does a pratfall over his own intestines, gets up and takes a bow.

  The place goes nuts.

  The Strongman lifts the girls, placing one on either shoulder, and they wave at the audience with fake severed arms and legs.

  Lydia wrenches free of me.

  —Fuck are you thinking, Pitt? There’s trouble, stay out of my way so you don’t get hurt.

  I raise my hands.

  —Yeah, my bad, forgot who’s wearing the trousers.

  —Fuck you.

  The Freaks wrap their curtain call. The audience laughs and claps and hoots and hollers and throws crumpled bills and loose change and the performers clear the stage and Tom Waits sings “Singapore,” their exit music, and the show is over.

  I count heads as the audience files out of the tent, try to figure who’s missing and how many.

  —Unconscionable! Immoral! And fantastically idiotic!

  —Oh! Oh sweet Jesus! Oh my Lord in Heaven, fuck me now!

  The midget has tucked the last of his intestine where it belongs; gritting his fake teeth, he pinches the edges of the wound together as Vendetta pulls a glowing iron rod from the brazier where it’s been heating in a pile of white coals and presses it against the torn flesh.

  The midget drops his head back and laughs and screams like a little kid on a roller coaster.

  —Hooooo! Whhooohoooo! Oh my! Oh my God! Sheeeeit!

  Vendetta pulls the rod away and the Glasseater pours cold water over the steaming cauterization.

  The midget brings his face down, tears running from the corners of his eyes, and exhales. He leers at Lydia.

  —Sorry about the language, just that hurts like a motherfucker.

  He peels one of the Pabst Blue Ribbons from the six at his feet and cracks it open.

  —So now, unconscionable, you were saying? I’m not sure about that part, not knowing what the word means and all, but fantastically idiotic is a phrase I could learn to love. That right there, that just about sums up the whole Freak, whatyacallit, value system in two words. Hatter, what’s a good word for value system?

  The MC takes a coverless pocket dictionary from inside his tailcoat and looks at a page.—Ethos.

  Lydia has her hands on her hips.

  —Make a joke out of it, make a joke out of it, but this is not the way we do things. If you plan on joining the Society, there’s going to be a whole new set of behaviors to learn. Because behavior like that?

  She points at the corpse flopped across the table they used in the Glasseater’s act, the chump they snatched and slashed during the finale blackout. The Strongman, still in his hood, pumps the dead guy’s chest, the last of his blood sputtering from the hole gnawed in his neck and filling the mason jar Harm holds against it.

  —Behavior like that will not be tolerated. A random act of violence, an outright murder that begs for attention, that will not be condoned in any way, shape or form by any Clan in Manhattan, let alone by the Society. The waste of blood aside, the moral issues aside, there’s just the practical question of exposure. A display like that? In public? You can make it look as fake as you like, but it’s going to draw attention. And what about the legal implications? This is an unlicensed operation. You’re only a half mile from the amusement park. What about the police?

  He drains his beer and grabs another.

  —Cops we got no problem with. Coney cops, you pitch them a C-note they could give a shit what you
do. As for attention, well, that’s the whole point isn’t it? No attention, no audience. We do things the freak show up on the boardwalk can only dream about. Funny thing is, they get up on their high horse ’bout what we do. Talk ’bout how faking is counter to the freak way of life. They only knew, they’d shit little purple HoHos.

  —Uh-huh, and what about other kinds of attention? You know we have a Van Helsing in Lower Manhattan right now? What happens if a Van Helsing hears about your act? Do you think he or she will have trouble telling the difference between pig intestine, Karo syrup and red food coloring, and the real thing? What you’re doing, it puts all infecteds at risk. Utterly without sanction. With no mandate at all. With no aim at all. Simple willfulness. Unconscionable.

  —Sister, ain’t no such thing as a Van Helsing.

  Her eyes bug.

  —No such thing?

  —You ever seen one? I never seen one. Urban legend. Stuff to scare kiddies with. Trust me, work in this game long as I have, you know a fake when you hear ’bout it.

  Lydia looks at me.

  —Joe?

  I look at my watch, the second hand sweeps around, shaving another sliver from the edge of the night.

  I look at the midget.

  —Got a guy on Rivington, in chunks.

  He looks down at his beer.

  —Cut up? How many pieces?

  —Fuck do I know, didn’t bother counting.

  He swirls the beer in his can and takes a swig.

  —Didn’t count ’em, or don’t know how?

  I look to Lydia.

  —These guys are assholes. We should go before they waste any more of our time.

  The midget points at me.

  —Watch who you’re calling asshole, shorty.

  I tap my watch.

  —Terry said there were supposed to be a couple dozen of them. What have we seen? Six assholes. There ain’t no more. They’re carneys. Professional liars. And they’re spastic. C’mon, we both know we’re not taking any of these losers to Manhattan. Let’s blow.

  He looks at Lydia.

  —Best put a muzzle on your hound, lady.

  —Joe’s not a dog, he’s a person. And I am not a lady, I am a woman.

  The midget runs a fingertip over the fresh seam of blisters that crosses his stomach. The white tips are already fading, pinking, healing; the Vyrus is putting the blood he sucked from the dead guy to good use.